I was talking to a storage expert the other day and he mentioned a customer that I have worked with has chosen to go all SSD in its data center. I would assume the logic is SSDs are the most efficient solution and given their purchasing power they can get prices that few others can get, therefore the cost differential vs. HDD can become a non-issue. I heard this and think I know some of the people behind this and I questioned their assumptions to use SSDs as storage solution that eliminates HDD.

Digital Ocean has a lot of hype with their all SSDs environment and the idea that SSDs are the future can be a “false positive."

Doing a bit of research I found StorageMojo recently posted on SSDs - hot, hungry and slow.

High performance SSDs: hot, hungry & sometimes slow

by ROBIN HARRIS on FRIDAY, 25 JULY, 2014

Anyone looking at how flash SSDs have revolutionized power constrained mobile computing could be forgiven for thinking that all SSDs are power-efficient. But they’re not.

The price of performanceEach flash die has limited bandwidth. Writes are slow. Wear must be leveled. ECC is required. DRAM buffers smooth out data flows. Controllers run code to manage all the tricks required to make an EEPROM look like a disk, only faster.

So the number of chips and channels in high performance SSDs has risen to achieve high bandwidth and low latency. Which takes power and creates heat.

Bottom line here are some insights.

Key findingsThe many-resource SSD exhibits several characteristics not usually associated with SSDs.

High temperatures. 150-210% higher than conventional SSDs, up to 182F.

This paper closes saying many-resource SSDs are 4-5X more power intense than conventional SSD and HDD.

Conclusions

In this paper, our empirical analysis reveal that dynamic power consumption of many-resource SSDs are respectively 5x and 4x worse than conventional SSD and HDD. Many-resource SSDs generate 58% higher operating tem- perature, which can introduce SSD overheating prob- lem and power throttling issues. Based on our analysis, HW/SW optimization studies are required to improve en- ergy efficiency of modern SSDs in many user scenarios.